How do you account for the prohibition on consuming the flesh of the swine in some religious cultures?

Question

in biological terms

Answer 1

halakhah (Jewish law) gives us distinct descriptions of what we can eat and cannot eat. "Do not drown a calf in it's mother's milk" tells us not to mix meat and dairy. We can only eat certain types of locusts (I wouldn't want to eat it though), poultry (I don't know the restrictions on it), mammals that have cloven hooves and chew their cud (which rules out pigs), and fish that have dorsal fins and scales. The biological reasons, other than those described, are not clear. I don't eat pork because halakhah tells me not to.

Answer 2

Americans seem to have the same aversion to eating horse meat. It's a cultural thing and probably if a new bible was written for Americans there would be some prohibition against eating horses.

People are biologically programmed to follow charismatic leaders who may be fools or geniuses.

Answer 3

I assume that trichinosis and pigs perceived uncleanliness may have something to do with it. A lot of pork may have been very undercooked in the early days, with swine having a larger load of the parasitic worm. So, the swine was proscribed religiously; a strong proscription.

Answer 4

What it is not related to is trichinosis; that wasn't discovered until relatively recently, in historic terms. It may have been observation that people who ate pork sometimes got sick or it may have just been a desire to be different from theneighbors.

Answer 5

Because their brains are less efficient than the rest of us. Believers that is, not pigs. Pigs are reasonably intelligent, more so than other animals we eat, and much cleaner than most people think.

Answer 6

This best described in the religious opinon of Answeres but just like a butthole everyone has one!